The Dancing Midget
La Danseuse microscopique, 1902, 2m43s
Star Film Catalogue No. 394-396
A top-hatted magician shakes out a sheet, from which his assistant emerges. The magician extracts six eggs from his assistant’s mouth, which he places onto a stand. He breaks the eggs into his hat, stirring them with his wand. He shakes a large number of feathers out of the hat over his assistant, and then extracts a large egg. He places it on the table, and it doubles in size, and then explodes, to reveal a tiny ballerina. She dances on the table-top, admired by the men, who perform crude imitations of her flowing movements. Suddenly, she grows to life-size, and the magician helps her off the table. The men place a large wooden crate onto two stands, and the assistant gets in. The magician drapes the sheet around the ballerina, and pulls it away to reveal his assistant - and the ballerina simultaneously emerges from the box. The three bow together, and the magician banishes his assistant before linking arms with the ballerina and walking into the distance.
The Dancing Midget (whose slightly more PC French title translates as ‘The Microscopic Female Dancer’) is another set of variations on familiar Méliès themes, though the central image of a tiny ballerina performing on a table-top is so delightful that it more than compensates for the sense of déjà vu that pervades much of the rest of the film, starting from the recycled set from The Dwarf and the Giant (Nain et géant, 1901).
Once again, we have the scenario of a magician and his assistant - the arrangement here is broadly similar to that in The Prince of Magicians (Excelsior!, 1901). In that film, the magician’s aide was turned into a makeshift soda siphon, while here he’s required to produce half a dozen eggs from his mouth in quick succession. Their contents are mixed in the magician’s top hat (using his wand to stir them), and a well-timed jump-cut leads to the first of the film’s oddly poetic images - this time, of an implausible number of feathers descending from the hat onto the assistant.
The centre-piece of the film involves the ballerina, who is hatched from an egg that grows to giant size - albeit, somewhat disappointingly, via jump-cuts rather than any of Méliès’s more elaborate shrinking and growing effects. But the tiny ballerina herself is wholly believable, especially given the way the men react to her and (badly) try to imitate her movements. After this high point, the film has nowhere else to go, despite Méliès attempting to maintain interest by introducing a new trick in the form of a sheet-and-coffin swapover (as usual, achieved via jump cuts).
There’s some severe damage at the beginning and end, and tramlines, speckling and mild exposure fluctuations throughout, but in general the untinted print on Flicker Alley’s DVD is in very good condition, the picture sufficiently sharp to be able to make out some background details in the superimposed material, which may not have been Méliès’ intention. Neal Kurz’s lyrical piano accompaniment fits the images to perfection.
Links
- Internet Movie Database entry.
- Jshaide’s review (Rotten Tomatoes forum)
Posted on 8th July 2008
Under: Jump-Cuts, Stage Magic, Superimposition, 1902 | No Comments »
A man clad in top hat and tails enters a well-appointed drawing room, tips his hat to the audience, and places it on a small table. He takes off his coat, and shakes a larger table out of it. After adjusting the positioning of the new table, he drapes his coat over it, and it turns into a white tablecloth. He picks up his hat, and reveals that it’s empty. He then pulls four plates out of it and lays them on the tablecloth. He returns to the hat, and pulls out a set of four glasses and napkins, which he lays out next to the plates. He pulls a carafe of water and a bottle of wine out of the hat, and then some cutlery. He returns to the hat, and looks at it quizzically before producing a fan out of his pocket and waving it. Both fan and hat take on gigantic proportions. He climbs onto a stool to reach inside the hat, from which he retrieves four chairs and places them round the table. He tilts the hat forwards to reveal that it’s empty, but then extracts a man and two women, who take their places around the table. He turns the hat upside down and shakes it, and a second man emerges. The host places the hat back on his head, and it shrinks to normal size. He invites his guests to sit down, then conjures up a serving maid, who gives them food. The host looks conspiratorially at the audience, and then leaps onto the table - which disappears into the floor, taking the host with him. A picture on the wall comes to life, and looks highly amused. The host re-emerges on the other side of the room, laughing heartily as his guests leave in a huff. The picture reverts to its static form. The host picks up the discarded tablecloth and tosses it in the air. When it descends onto his shoulders, it turns back into his coat. He picks up his top hat, bows and leaves.
Although from a technical viewpoint this is largely familiar stuff, the timing of the business with the coat (which disgorges a table before transforming itself into a tablecloth) is impressively adroit, and the moment towards the very end when a portrait comes to life is delightfully unexpected. Instead of returning to the superimposition technique featured in 
Two men enter a room, one wearing a pale wig, the other a dark-haired magician. The latter bows to an unseen audience, turns to his companion and indicates that he should do something. The bewigged man leans forward slightly, and the magician pulls a cloth from out of his mouth. The magician displays the cloth from all possible angles, and produces a glass bowl from behind it. After placing it on a small chest, the magician positions his friend and pumps his arm up and down. The man’s mouth emits a jet of water, but it misses the bowl at first. The magician adjusts its position and continues pumping. When it is full of water, the magician picks up the bowl and puts it on a small table. He pats the man on the back, and a fish emerges from his mouth, which is placed in the bowl. Another fish is produced in a similar fashion. The magician then hands the bowl to his friend, but it bursts into flames, and he quickly puts it down. The magician produces a large piece of cloth from the bowl, behind which is a gigantic lobster. The magician hands the lobster to his friend, transforming it into a woman in the process. The magician wraps a sheet around her and pulls it away to reveal a girl sitting on top of another girl’s shoulders. The magician separates them, takes them each by the hand, and makes them bow to the audience. He then transforms them into pieces of cloth, which he inserts into the bowl. He asks his friend to bring over another bowl, and he pours water out of the first bowl into it. The friend examines the second bowl rather too closely for the magician’s comfort, and he angrily expels him from the room. He then picks up a large sheet, wraps himself up in it, and ascends through the ceiling. He re-enters the room just in time to catch the falling sheet. He bows again. 
Given that Flicker Alley’s DVDs (both Georges Méliès: The First Wizard of Cinema 1896-1913 and Saved From The Flames) contain what is believed to be the only surviving copy of this film (Lobster Films in Paris obtained it after purchasing a job-lot of prints found in an antique dealer’s trunk), it’s in remarkably good condition, with only minor surface famage and a generally very sharp, well-exposed picture. The jaunty chamber-orchestra score is pretty generic, but sets the right tone.
A man lays out seven chairs in a row and counts and recounts them to make sure. He sits down in the one on the far right, and splits in two, his double moving to the seat next to him. This process is repeated until there are seven men, identical except for their differing musical instruments, occupying all the chairs. They chat amongst each other until the man in the middle stands up to conduct. The six instrumentalists perform, then sit back and relax. The conductor stands up again and indicates that they should come closer. They do so, blending into each other until only the conductor is left. He makes the chairs disappear and reappear en bloc, then individually. As he is bowing to the audience, a gigantic fan rises behind him, startling him when he turns round. He sits on the only remaining chair and sinks through the floor of the stage. He then reappears on the other side of the fan, jumping over it before disappearing in a puff of smoke. The fan descends to reveal him behind it. He bows to the audience.
Méliès was no stranger to playing the lead in his films, but it’s worth noting that in this and The Four Troublesome Heads, he’s performing without any elaborate costume or make-up, as though he wanted to be as recognisable as possible. Given that the early screenings would presumably have been held in his own theatre with the man himself in attendance, this would have added an extra dimension to the fakery. It’s the work of a showman with plenty to show off, though the film’s second half sadly lacks the fireworks of the first - the multiple-Méliès orchestra is such a tour de force that the solo business with the fan can’t help but seem a bit anti-climactic.
Tom Whisky performs a lively dance. Exhausted, he pulls up a chair and sits on it, only to find a woman appearing underneath him. He leaps up, grabs another chair, and the same thing happens - and then again with a third. The three women get up, and Tom pushes them together until they turn into a single, much larger woman. Alarmed, he pushes down on her head, shrinking her to a small child. This fails to meet with his satisfaction, so he pulls her up to the large woman again, and splits her into the original trio. He pulls out the chairs for them and lets them sit down… (print ends here)
What’s also striking about the film is the way the many jump-cuts have been carefully planned so that they integrate seamlessly with Tom Whisky’s whirling dance routine, which was clearly much less wild and random than it appears at first glance. Even though it’s obvious how they were created (to a large extent, this film harks back to Méliès’ earliest jump-cut experiments of 1896), the rapidity of his movements is clearly intended to distract the viewer’s eye from the trickery being performed elsewhere. It’s an age-old trick that an experienced stage magician like Méliès would have mastered long before he came anywhere near a camera.
A man walks behind a large, empty gilded picture frame, then round the front, then round the back again before stepping through it. He then rolls up the background scenery to reveal the grounds of a chateau. He picks up a canvas depicting a landscape and fits it into the frame. He then picks up a stool and places it within the frame. He takes a seat and observes the painting, which slips out of focus and then gradually sharpens to reveal the same man sitting on the stool. They gesture and react to each other, and appear to share a joke. Finally, the portrait slips out of focus again, revealing the empty stool in front of the landscape. (print ends here)
The essential theatricality of The Mysterious Portrait is emphasised at the start, when Méliès, after demonstrating that the frame is indeed empty by walking around and then through it, blithely rolls up the previous background, revealing it to be a painted backdrop on canvas. The function of this would seem to be not so much an implicit claim that nothing in this film is to be believed, as a deliberately clunky and obvious effect that would be registered by even the most dimwitted spectator. By contrast, the appearance of the portrait makes use of genuinely cutting-edge film technology, and would have looked far more impressive to an 1899 audience. An experienced stage illusionist, Méliès remained an incorrigible showman to the last.
A stage magician props up a female dummy on a table and lets it fall back before grabbing it and transforming it into a live ballerina. He helps her down and she performs some ballet steps before sitting in a chair. The magician places a large tube on the table and covers her with a cloth. She vanishes, and reappears inside the tube. The magician helps her down again, and picks her up in his arms. She dissolves into a shower of confetti. He places the tube on the table again, stands over the confetti and drapes the cloth over himself. He vanishes and reappears in the tube. Jumping down from the table, he turns into the ballerina. She climbs back onto the table, jumps down, and turns back into the magician. He takes a step back and vanishes, re-emerging on the left-hand side of the stage. He gets on the table, sits cross-legged, and disappears in a puff of smoke.
The original French title, L’Illusionniste fin-de-siècle, translates as literally ‘The Turn-of-the-Century Illusionist’. Since the film was made almost exactly at the turn of the twentieth century, it presumably refers to the now formidable array of cinematic tricks that Méliès had developed since he discovered the cinema - beforehand, he had of course been an actual stage magician, but the illusions he was able to conjure up by now dwarfed anything achievable on stage. Although nearly all the effects here are based on the usual jump-cut transformation principle, the timing here is particularly adroit - there’s a real fluidity about the movements of both magician and ballerina that must have required a great deal of planning and rehearsal to get right. As usual, Méliès himself plays the magician.
A stage magician stands between two tables, removes his head and places it at the far left of one of them. He then grows another head and crawls under the table to prove that the head is indeed completely detached. He then removes his second head and places it alongside the first one: they strike up a conversation. Having grown a third head, the magician removes it and places it on the right-hand table. He grows a fourth head, picks up a banjo and starts to sing, the three other heads joining in. Unable to stand the racket, the magician hits the two left-hand heads with his banjo, and they vanish. He removes his head and tosses it away, replacing it with the head on the right-hand table. He bounces the new head on his shoulders as though it was a football before taking a bow. 
He could easily have stopped there, and the film would be impressive enough. But instead, he repeats the trick a second and third time, so that he now has three separate heads on two tables. Meticulously calibrated timing means that they chat to each other and eventually sing in unison, accompanied by the full-bodied Méliès on the banjo. And then, in a moment that’s laugh-out-loud funny to this day, he detests their caterwauling so much that he beats the two left-hand heads with the banjo, causing them to vanish. Finally, almost as an encore, he removes his head again, replacing it with the remaining head on the table, “heading” it football-style before letting it find a permanent resting-place on his shoulders. 
A stage magician produces a dove from his sleeve, kisses it and puts it in a large wooden box that is mounted on a small table. He then throws in various items of clothing and makes a symbolic gesture. A small child emerges from the box, and the magician carries him out, placing him on a small plinth. He then produces a large axe and cuts the boy down the middle, producing two identical children. They begin to fight each other, and the magician picks one up and turns him upside down. The boy is transformed into a piece of paper, which the magician rips up. He puts the other boy back in the box, whose walls he then systematically removes with a hammer, revealing nothing inside. He pats one of the now-separated sides of the box as it lies on the floor, and the boy reappears on top of it. The magician picks him up, and the boy turns into a couple of large flags, which the magician waves at the audience. Finally, he climbs onto the table, sits cross-legged and vanishes in a puff of smoke. He re-emerges from the side of the stage to take a bow.
The division by axe is by far the film’s high point, after which it returns to familiar Méliès territory, with both boys being transformed by more jump-cuts into a piece of paper and a couple of flags respectively, and we have also seen an exploding disappearing act in such films as 
A man dressed as a wizard makes a table appear out of nowhere, and then conjures up a wooden box on top of it. He then leaps towards the box, and vanishes. A man dressed as Pierrot immediately bursts out of the box and jumps onto the floor (at which point a chair appears). He tries to make things appear on the now-empty table, but fails. Dejectedly, he sits on the chair, whereupon food and drink appear on the table. Delighted, he tastes the food and, satisfied, sits back down - but the chair, table and food disappear, leaving him on the ground. A man in Elizabethan doublet and hose appears and claps him on the shoulder, turning him into a bearded artist. The Elizabethan man vanishes, and the artist picks up a bust from the floor and puts it onto a pedestal. He chips at its face, whereupon it comes to life and grabs the hammer and chisel. It then grows an attractive female body, which the artist tries in vain to hug - it keeps disappearing and reappearing in various statuesque poses before vanishing for good in a puff of smoke. The Elizabethan man reappears and kicks the artist’s behind… (print ends here)
One immediate point of interest in The Magician, as it’s an effect not present in any previous surviving Méliès film, is the moment when the bust switches from a rather obviously painted prop (the protagonist was presumably meant to keep it facing in the same head-on direction throughout, but a slight shift in perspective betrays its essential flatness) to something that suddenly comes to life. Presumably the woman who plays the now-aggressive bust is mostly clad in black and standing behind the flat representing the stand, but the effect of a disembodied head and upper body anticipates the kind of multiple-exposure trickery that Méliès would soon undertake in such films as The Four Troublesome Heads (Un homme de tête, 1898).